Imagine if you had the ability to travel back in time. But when you returned to the present, you found that you couldn’t remember any of it. Physicists believe this is a real consequence that time travelers could face.
The study was published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, as reported by Interesting technology.
While most research has focused on the mechanisms of time travel, little attention has been paid to its effects on the traveler. The new study suggests that traveling through time may have unusual side effects, most notably the loss of all memories of the trip.
Researchers believe this phenomenon is related to the concept of a “closed timelike curve” (CTC), a feature of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
A closed time-like curve is a concept in Einstein’s general theory of relativity in which spacetime forms loops under certain conditions. These loops result in paths in spacetime that return to their starting point, allowing time travel to an earlier point.
According to scientists, the second law of thermodynamics states that when a person travels back in time and returns to the present, the entropy, or degree of disorder in a system, always increases with time.
This process cannot be easily reversed because it would mean a decrease in entropy, which does not occur naturally in the universe.
Physicists believe that as a person travels along a closed, time-like curve, from the present to the past and then back to the present, their entropy must first increase, reach a peak, and then return to the same level.
According to the study, disorder begins to decrease after entropy reaches its peak and the time traveler returns to the present, resulting in all thermodynamic processes, including biological processes such as memory formation, being reversed.
Therefore, a person is unlikely to remember anything from his journey into the past, as his memories will be erased by the time he returns to the present.
You might think that if you can’t remember your trip back in time, you can take a photo of the events and then look at the photos and remember everything. But physicists say the second law of thermodynamics applies not only to humans, but also to machines and other inanimate objects.
So, for example, if a person saves data on their smartphone while traveling through time, it will most likely also be erased once the person returns to the present.
The study authors also concluded that a person’s wristwatch can show the wrong time during time travel because it is designed to move only linearly. Although time travel is theoretically possible, humans cannot travel into the past, meaning the physicists’ findings cannot be tested.
